Playhouse, is a photographic collaboration between photographer, Joshua Bookhalter, and visual artist, Madeline LeBlanc. In the foreground of the images stand a whimsical playhouse and playground in contradiction to the Canadian National Railway. The railway being a symbol of the Industrial Revolution hauntingly contrasts that of an industrial world to places of recess.
The train precluded the urbanization of communities, which has led to the disappearance of green space and places to play. Constructed out of paper, the playhouse and the floating daisies surrounding it, visualize play in the industrial age as something fleeting - it's as if any moment the frolicking subject and the space she finds herself in could blow away.
The cartoony imagery of the foreground juxtaposes the mechanistic background, enabling eerie surrealism that is further developed by the analogous saturation of pinks and purples throughout the images; seeking to create a sense of calm amongst a backdrop of turbulence. The grain of the photograph aims to invoke a feeling of nostalgia. With this nostalgia, Bookhalter and LeBlanc bare the reality of their own personal longing and one of the community: to find play amongst a world systematically structured to favor labor.